An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
Crypto does have all those benefits, but without wide enough adoption, there’s genuinely nothing valuable about it. Just like real money. It is immune to a certain kind of corruption (manipulating the money supply) but very weak to another kind (making your own worthless currency to scam people with).
Even if we got society to go full crypto acceptance, governments would do all they can to control it. Manipulating the money supply is how you get every politician’s favorite thing ever; an economy fueled through the debt of future generations.
The fediverse has the same conceptual benefits and the same problem of needing large groups of people to grow, but there is a big difference: having spaces for online communication not controlled by single actors is valuable in and of itself. Whether enough people find it valuable enough to participate is up to them, but the concept, at least, is incredibly appealing especially at this current moment.
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